In this paper

we present a new method for frontal-view face detection.Instead of viewing face patterns as a single cluster in the high-dimensional space as several previous approaches

we propose that face patterns can be better described by multiple clusters.We obtain four clsters by employing an optimal clustering method.Using each cluster center as a template

we adopt Mahalanobis-distance-based template matching to find the face location in an image.The experimental results show that our method outperforms the methods that are based on a single cluster.